enshittification

Wow. The Onion's AV Club just turned into a pile of hot garbage. Who is behind the ongoing enshittification of web design?

2013 November 19, @St_Rev, Twitter, archived from the original on 05 Jul 2023

Ultimately, it doesn't matter if Amazon's enshittification is because [Jeff] Bezos was a cynic or because he sold out. Once Amazon could make more money by screwing its customers, that screw-job became a fait accompli.

2022 November 28, Cory Doctorow, “How monopoly enshittified Amazon”, in Pluralistic, archived from the original on 26 Mar 2023

Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. ¶ I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

2023 January 28, Cory Doctorow, “The ’Enshittification’ of TikTok”, in Wired, San Francisco, Calif.: Condé Nast Publications, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 20 Jan 2024

Both switching costs and network effects tend to lead to enshittification because platform providers see early adopters as an investment in future profits.

2023 March 3, Tim Harford, “The enshittification of apps is real. But is it bad?”, in Financial Times, London: The Financial Times Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 05 Mar 2023

But it's not just users who are effectively incarcerated by enshittification. The advertisers and vendors who are the real customers of tech platforms are also prisoners.

2023 March 11, John Naughton, “Users, advertisers – we are all trapped in the 'enshittification' of the internet”, in The Observer, London: Guardian News & Media, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 19 Apr 2023